MostEvil book review

Fall Books Special: M y Dad Did I t
Steve Model, the retired LA c o p w h o pinned the Black Dahlia
murder on his p o p , believes he was also Chicago's Lipstick
Killer.
By Michael Lenehan
Dr. George Hodel, circa 1937
COURTESY OF STEVE HODEL
Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and t h e Further Serial Murders o f Dr.
George Hill Hodel Steve Hodel (Dutton)
A
t about 1:30 in the m o r n i n g on January 7, 1 9 4 6 , James Degnan,
a federal government employee w h o lived w i t h his family at
5943 N. Kenmore, heard his six-year-old daughter Suzanne
say, "I'm too sleepy. I d o n ' t want t o get up." He t h o u g h t she was
talking in her sleep. When he went t o awaken her at 7:30, she was
gone. About 1 2 hours later her head was f o u n d in a sewer and the
city was in a panic.
The police, of course, were eager t o make an arrest. They focused
first on Hector V e r b u r g h , a 65-year-old j a n i t o r who lived in the
neighborhood and w o r k e d in the b u i l d i n g where the girl's body was
dismembered. He was released after two days and p r o m p t l y t o l d a
story that's become familiar to Chicagoans, charging that police tried
to force a confession by b l i n d f o l d i n g h i m , c u f f i n g his hands behind
his back, and raising his body by the arms into a position that
t o r t u r e d him and left h i m unable to w o r k . He sued, and the city
eventually settled f o r $ 2 0 , 0 0 0 .
Also questioned in the case, a m o n g many others, were several men
called Sherman, a handkerchief bearing that surname having been
left near the crime scene. After seizing one w r o n g Sherman in Toledo,
police finally traced the hankie to army sergeant Seymour Sherman,
who was on a t r o o p t r a n s p o r t ship at the t i m e of the slaying. They
then questioned an army b u d d y of Sherman's in Dunkirk, New York.
And another man w h o was overheard saying "It oug ht to be w o r t h
$ 2 0 , 0 0 0 , " the amount specified In a ransom note f o u n d in the girl's
b e d r o o m . And another w h o was overheard in a r o o m i n g house on
South Clark Street, m u t t e r i n g in his sleep about "cutti ng arms off." He
said he knew no t h i n g about the m u r d e r but confessed to being
drunk.
This went on for six m o n t h s , w i t h every t w i s t covered in breathless
detail by the city's five c o m p e t i n g newspapers. Finally, in late June,
police f o u n d the man they needed, or rather the boy: William Heirens,
a 1 7-year-old University o f Chicago student w i t h a bad habit o f
c o m m i t t i n g petty burglaries. They held and grilled him f or nearly a
week before allowing h i m contact w i t h the defense attorneys his
parents had hired. They gave h i m Sodium Pentothal—"truth s e r u m " —
w i t h o u t his permission or the knowledge o f his lawyers. They
administered a lie detector test and dismissed the result as " f u t i l e " —
t h o u g h experts who examined the test years later said it showed
Heirens answered t r u t h f u l l y t h a t he d i d n ' t kill Suzanne Degnan.
The prosecutors openly a d m i t t e d t h a t they d i d n ' t have enough
admissible evidence to w i n a trial, so they pressed Heirens to accept a
plea deal: no death penalty and concurrent rather than consecutive
life sentences if he w o u l d confess to the Degnan killing and two
others that had come to be associated w i t h it, known collectively as
the "Lipstick Murders" because o f a note scrawled in red lipstick on
one victim's living r o o m w al l : "For heavens sake catch me before I kill
more I cannot control myself."
Heirens's p a r l n t s urged him to accept the deal,
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and so did his lawyers, brothers John and Malachy
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Coghlan. Indeed, the Coghlans were so helpful
m a ki ng the deal that the prosecutors t h a n k e d
t h e m later in open c o u rt. The final blow was
probably dealt by Tribune reporter George
Wright, who on July 16 published a page-one
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blockbuster w i t h the banner headline How
Heirens Slew 3." Citing unnamed "unimpeachable
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,
The Lipstick Killers
message
COURTESY OF STEVE HODEL
sources," the story recounted the three murders
in vivid detail. "He t o o k f r o m his pocket a pad of letter paper.
Carefully tearing out the last sheet in the pad, to be sure it w o u l d
bear no impression f r o m previous sheets, he tore the sheet in half
lengthwise and wrote the ransom note on one of the halves. . . ."
T h o u g h the article contained explicit denials f r o m both prosecutors
and defense lawyers t h a t there had been a confession, Wright made
the story sound like it had come straight o u t of Heirens's m o u t h . In
hindsight, it appears to have been the confession that prosecutors
were concocting as part of the plea deal. In any case, it was picked up
and amplified by the other papers in the city and beyond,
c o n t r i b u t i n g to pressure t h a t Heirens was finally unable to resist. The
deal seemed to be the only way to stay alive. In September 1 9 4 6 ,
Heirens signed a confession and was led o f f to prison, where he has
remained fo r the last 63 years. (For a detailed account of the case,
and especially the media frenzy, see Robert McClory's
"Kill-Crazed
Animal?" which ran in the Reader A u g u s t 2 4 , 1 989.)
Heirens has been protesting his innocence ever since. And thanks in
part to the help of supporters on the outside, including the Center on
Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's law school, his
case has come up f o r review in various venues over the years—but to
no avail.
Now Heirens's case is being revisited in a book by Steve Hodel, a
retired Los Angeles homicide detective w h o has a new theory on w ho
killed little Suzanne Degnan.
Hodel's first book. Black Dahlia Avenger, published in 2 0 0 3 , pretty
much solved the famous "Black Dahlia" murder, a gruesome
Hollywood crime that's inspired numerous books and screenplays and
decades of detective w o r k and speculation. In his new book, Most
Evil, he and coauthor Ralph Pezzullo claim to have solved not only the
murders fo r which Heirens is i mp ri s o n e d but also the 1 9 6 7 "Jigsaw
Murder" of a 29-year-old w o m a n in Manila and the "Zodiac" murders
in the Bay Area in the late 1 960s. Hodel t h i n k s all these murders, a
total of at least 1 8, were c o m m i t t e d by the same man who killed
Elizabeth Short, aka the Black Dahlia:
His father.
In h i s d e t a i l e d , w e l l - d o c u m e n t e d b o o k s , H o d e l d e s c r i b e s
hi s
father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, as an evil genius right out of central
casting. A mut§ical p r o d i g y w i t h an IQ of 1 8 6 , he entered Cal Tech at
age 1 5 and left shortly thereafter, Steve Hodel says, having
impregnated the wife of a faculty member. He drove a cab and
reported crime stories f o r the Los Angeles Record. He hung w i t h the
y o u n g John Huston and started a literary magazine, Fantasia,
dedicated to the "portrayal of bizarre beauty in the arts" and to such
"beauty as we may f i n d in a p o e m , a sketch . . . a temple or a brothel
or a gaol; in prayer or perversity or sin." With a g i r l f r i e n d he opened a
bookstore, then got a Job as a radio host, then moved to the Bay
Area, where he t o o k a premed degree at Berkeley and enrolled in
medical school at UCSF. He and the g i r l f r i e n d , now parents of a
y o u n g boy, wrote a travel-at-home c o l u m n for the San Francisco
Chronicle. Somewhere in there, he and another w o m a n produced his
t h i r d child, a girl named Tamar.
After graduating f r o m med school, the d o c t o r accepted a public
health j o b that t o o k him to Indian reservations in the southwest.
Eventually he returned to Los Angeles, where he became the county's
chief VD control officer and ran a private VD clinic on the side—a
specialty that gave him access to the secrets o f Hollywood's rich and
naughty.
When Huston divorced his wife Dorothy, George t o o k up w i t h her.
They wed and had f o u r sons, including Steve, who remembers the
mid-1 940s as a glamorous time o f parties and i m p o r t a n t p e o p l e Huston, Henry IVliller, IVIan Ray.
The f u n ended abruptly in 1 9 4 9 , when D o r o t h y packed up her boys
and f l e d . Steve later learned that his father had been accused of
having sex w i t h Tamar at one of the p a r t i e s — w i t h three guests
looking o n . Tamar became pregnant and had an a b o r t i o n . She was
1 4. At his arrest George allowed as how he and Tamar had been
"exploring the mysteries o f sex." Despite this admission, he was
miraculously acquitted in a very public t r i a l . A short time later he
moved to Hawaii (which was not yet a state), where he t o o k a degree
in psychiatry. For the next 40 years he lived in Manila, where he
married wife number three, had f o u r more children, and embarked on
a new career in international m a r k e t i n g . He returned to the San
Francisco area w i t h a f o u r t h wife in 1 9 9 0 .
By that time Steve had retired after 24 years in the LA police
department, most of t h e m as a homicide detective. When his father
died in 1 999, he f o u n d himself w o r k i n g the case o f his old man's life.
It started w i t h a small album that seemed to contain photos o f the
most important people in the doctor's life: his father, his children, his
wives . . . and Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. Wondering what the
connection m i g h t be, Steve started p o k i n g a r o u n d ; three years later
he published Black Dahlia Avenger, accusing his father o f Short's
murder. As a result o f his w o r k , the LA district attorney's office
unearthed a secret file on the 5 5-year-old case—a file buried right
around the time George lit o u t f o r Hawaii. It confirmed that the
d o c t o r had dated Short and revealed that he'd been a prime suspect
in the murder"%efore the investigation was mysteriously shut d o w n . It
also contained notes that led to Chicago: an LA detective reported
that in 1 9 4 6 , about six months before she was m u r d e r e d . Short had
spent a few weeks here, sleeping around w i t h cops and reporters and
asking a lot of questions about the Lipstick Murders.
Steve Hodel believes that Short had an inkling her doctor friend was
connected to the murders in Chicago, and that he learned of her
suspicion and killed her. This, Steve posits, was after he'd killed at
least seven other w o m e n in and around Los Angeles, including oil
heiress Georgette Bauerdorf and actress Jean Spangler. He also
believes his father killed Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside, California, in
1 966 before going on to the Jigsaw and Zodiac murders.
A l t h o u g h Hodel cannot definitively place his father at the scene of
every crime, he does establish that the d o c t o r was quite capable o f
the necessary g l o b e - h o p p i n g . He says George traveled east f r o m LA
multiple times between 1 9 4 4 and '46, trips that in those days were
likely to include a stop in Chicago. In 1 9 4 6 , having taken a UN j o b in
China (from which he was discharged after only seven months f o r
unspecified "personal reasons"), he t o o k a crash course in Chinese
and traveled at least once t o Washington, D.C. During the war years,
Hodel says, the military's t o p language school was headquartered at
the University of Chicago. By the t i m e o f the Zodiac murders, George
Hodel was an international businessman w h o traveled f r e q u e n t l y to
the U.S. f r o m his base in Manila.
Hodel ties the f a r - f l u n g murders t o g e t h e r w i t h several strands of
m o d u s operandi. In three o f the m u r d e r s — D e g n a n in Chicago, Short
in Los Angeles, and Lucila Lalu y T o l e n t i n o in Manila—the victims
were dismembered by a person w h o had clear expertise in surgery or
butchering. In both Chicago and LA, lipstick was used to write
messages. In the Black Dahlia and Zodiac cases, the killer sent
t a u n t i n g notes to the press and police, o f t e n littered w i t h what
appeared to be deliberate misspellings meant to make the w r i t e r
seem cruder than he really was. Many o f the mailings were posted
w i t h two stamps where one w o u l d have sufficed. Several of the
victims were posed after having been m u r d e r e d . Handwriting analysis
shows connections between George Hodel's known h a n d w r i t i n g and
notes w r i t t e n by the Lipstick killer, the Black Dahlia killer, and Zodiac
killer.
Perhaps more interesting than the physical evidence is the
psychological profile Hodel constructs t o make sense of his father's
crimes. He believes they constitute an oeuvre of surrealist art, w i t h
allusions to works as diverse as Man Ray's p h o t o g r a p h The Minotaur,
Salvador Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory, the movie Charlie
Chan at Treasure Island, and the 1 932 f i l m adaptation o f Richard
Connell's story "The Most Dangerous Game." The killings also allude
to one another, in Hodel's view. Suzanne Degnan's arms were f o u n d ,
for instance, in a sewer j u s t o f f Hollywood Avenue. Hodel interprets
this placement as a pointer west t o the Los Angeles area, where
Elizabeth Short's body was f o u n d in a field on a road that forks o f f
Degnan Boulej/ard. In Manila, the severed torso o f the j i g s a w v i c t i m
was f o u n d in a vacant lot on or near Zodiac Street.
There's plenty more o f that in Most Evil, and it gets weirder and more
complicated. If the whole t h i n g sounds preposterous in summary, it's
much less so in his clear, patient, and detailed prose. Sure it strains
credulity, but so does having a few friends over to watch you explore
the mysteries of sex w i t h your 1 4-year-old daughter.
None of this is likely to do Bill Heirens any g o o d . Dolores
Kennedy, his l o n g t i m e advocate and author o f William Heirens: His
Day in Court (1 991), provided i n f o r m a t i o n t o Hodel and finds his
a r g u m e n t generally persuasive. But she is focused less on w h o did
the crimes than on w h o d i d n ' t . Over the years, she says, "There have
been lots of Indications t h a t Bill Heirens d i d n ' t c o m m i t these
murders, but none of t h e m have opened any doors."
By all accounts, Heirens has been a perfect prisoner. He was the first
person in Illinois to earn a four-year college degree f r o m prison; he's
learned and t a ug ht TV repair, advised o t h e r inmates on their legal
matters, and played an i m p o r t a n t role in i m p r o v i n g and e x p a n d i n g
prison education and library p r o g r a m s . Parole boards long ago
conceded that he is completely rehabilitated. But every time he comes
up fo r parole—more than 30 times to date—relatives of Suzanne
Degnan come forward to protest, and the system defers to t h e m .
The politics seem i n s u r m o u n t a b l e . When Heirens came close to
w i n n i n g his freedom in 1 9 8 3 , the current Mayor Daley—then the
Cook County state's attorney—called h i m a " b l o o d t h i r s t y killer" w ho
"deserves as little mercy as he showed his innocent and helpless
victims." Attorney General Neil Hartigan tagged him a "kill-crazed
animal." Before a 2 0 0 7 parole hearing, the Sun-Times i n t o n e d , "
[WJhether he is a threat or not, his crime was t o o terrible to forgive."
This summer Heirens was denied parole again, by a vote of 1 2-2. He
is 81 and requires expensive care. His best hope now, Kennedy
t h i n k s , is the desperate c o n d i t i o n o f the Illinois budget. Maybe the
state will finally release h i m to save money.
But even if Heirens is never f re e d , he could be exonerated. One of the
virtues of Most Evil is t h a t Hodel e x p l i c i t l y invites f u r t h e r
investigation by p o i n t i n g out bits of evidence that m i g h t prove or
disprove his case. After our interview he d u g f r o m his files an FBI
receipt number for "two black hair follicles" taken as evidence in the
Degnan case. According to a Tribune story f r o m January 1 9 4 6 , police
f o u n d "two black, curly hairs" on the m u r d e r e d child's torso that
"probably fell f r o m the slayer's head as he was d i s m e m b e r i n g the
body." Hodel also has objects t h a t could produce samples of his
father's DNA. If the FBI still has the black hairs, testing could prove
once and for all that Chicago prosecutors g o t the right man. Or the
w r o n g one.
The receipt number is PC 1 6 3 3 9 AO Q 2 1 . Somebody should look it
up.